Types of LTM

• Tulvling said the multi store models view of long term memory was too simplistic

  he proposed 3 types of LTM stores
• episodic

  our ability to recall events

  time stamped, complex

  includes several elements- people, places, objects, behaviours

  a conscious effort is required to recall the memory
• semantic

  shared knowledge of the world

  less personal, more factual

  less vulnerable to distortion and forgetting
• procedural

  for actions and skills

  don‘t use conscious effort to recall

  the ability to do these things becomes automatic

  hard to explain to others and doing so can make the task more difficult
• a strength is the case study of HM and Clive wearing

  episodic memory was severely impaired due to brain damage

  But their semantic memories were relatively unaffected

  They still understood the meaning of words, and their procedural memories were still in tact

  This evidence supports tulvings view that there are different memory stores in long-term memory

  however, studies on brain injuries lack control variables. researchers have no way of controlling what happened to the patients memory before or during the injury, or know what their memory was like before
• a limitaion is conflicting research findings linking types of LTM to areas of the brain

  psychologist reviewed evidence regarding the location of semantic and episodic memory

  They concluded semantic is located on the left side of the prefrontal cortex and episodic memory on the right

  however, other research links the left prefrontal cortex with encoding of episodic memory and the right prefrontal cortex with retrieval of episodic memory
• a strength is real world application

  Understanding types of LTM allows psychologist to help people with memory problems

  for example, as people age, they experience memory loss, but research has shown this seems to be specific to the episodic memory, it becomes harder to recall memories of personal events that occurred relatively recently.

  this has allowed for training to be given to older people to improve their episodic memories